Professor Landis received his B.S. from MIT and his Ph.D. from Berkeley. He taught at URI during the 1980s, and was very popular with students and colleagues alike. He subsequently taught at Berkeley and Georgia Tech, moving to Penn in 2007. His interests span a variety of urban development topics; his recent research and publications focus on growth management, infill housing, and the geography of urban employment centers.

Together with several generations of Ph.D. students, Professor Landis developed the California Urban Futures series of urban growth models. He is currently engaged in a National Science Foundation-funded project to model, forecast, and develop alternative spatial scenarios of U.S. population and employment patterns and their impacts on travel demand, habitat loss, and water use through 2050. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Planning Association and Housing Policy Debate, and is a member of the Urban Land Institute.